April is the cruellest month, breeding Desmonds out of the dead land. How can we explain or endure the antics of Richard Desmond, proprietor and pornographer, goose-stepping in front of Daily Telegraph executives urging them not to do business with Germans because, in his considered view, all Germans are Nazis?

Desmond's behaviour has embarrassed the Tory party, to whom he has sworn allegiance. But how embarrassed are the leaders of the Labour party who, only two years ago, accepted a handsome £100,000 donation from Mr Desmond a few days after his takeover of the Express group had been waved through by the Labour government?

Why should Mr Desmond, a devoted Tory, give money to the Labour party? His answer would no doubt be based on what is known as the "Ecclestone principle", after another Tory who gave £1m to New Labour in the belief that it was "good for business" and especially good for the business of advertising tobacco, which Labour was bound by its 1997 manifesto to ban. When it emerged that Labour's manifesto promise was not going to apply to the biggest area of advertising tobacco - on Formula One motor racing, run by Mr Ecclestone - Mr Ecclestone got his money back. The new Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, insisted that none of this could possibly be corrupt since it was obvious to everyone that he was a "pretty straight guy".

In June 2002, the straight guy was on the rack again over the pornographer Desmond's donation. Jeremy Paxman asked Blair how he justified accepting money from Dirty Des. Blair's answer should be embalmed in the Labour party constitution, perhaps as a better substitute for the old clause four. "If someone is fit and proper to own one of the major newspaper groups in the country," he said, "there is no reason why we shouldn't accept donations from them."

When I first read that, I thought it must be a sub-editor's error, that the word "no" had been wrongly inserted. The sentence should surely have read: "If someone is a fit and proper person to own one of the major newspaper groups in the country, there is a reason why we shouldn't accept donations from them." But on reflection, recalling in particular Mr Blair's passionate relationship with the Thatcherite union-buster Rupert Murdoch, I realised that he meant exactly what he said. The New Labour principle shines out clearly. Anyone who has enough money to get control of a major newspaper group is "fit and proper" to give money to Labour. The fact that newspaper proprietors through the ages have been an unsavoury and reactionary bunch need not deter New Labour from taking their money.

The principle can be extended. New Labour ministers yearn for the approval of all the people who own the means of production, distribution and exchange. The irresistible attraction of such people is that, unlike Labour councillors or trade union leaders, they are not elected. So New Labour policy is made not by people who have to face any electorate, but by "advisers" whom Blair appoints to his huge office and whose chief qualification is due deference to unaccountable millionaires. Thus when Blair wants to change his mind on whether to hold a referendum, for instance, he consults advisers and millionaires so long as they are not even members of the cabinet. When those advisers and millionaires leave him to join their heroes at BP or KPMG or Goldman Sachs there is nothing he can do but applaud them.

· Several years ago, I gave the Stephen Swingler lecture at Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffs. Mr Swingler was Labour MP for the area until his premature death in 1969. He was a fervent socialist, and a transport minister in Harold Wilson's government. I was surprised, on a cold winter evening, to find some 200 people crowded into a school hall for the lecture.

I spoke about the historic difficulties of achieving socialist policies through the Labour party, and was impressed by the enthusiasm and hospitality of my hosts, who included Anne Swingler, Stephen's widow. As so often on these occasions, however, I felt that very few people agreed with me. So I am delighted all these years later to report that Anne Swingler, 89, a loyal Labour member for more than 70 years, has left the Labour party and joined the Respect coalition.

In her polite resignation letter to the local Labour party, in which she promises to support her MP, Glenda Jackson, and to rejoin the party if its policies change, she singles out the government's abandonment of council housing, and its support for George Bush, the "most rightwing and belligerent president ever".